Blossom Blast Saga

The first large game built with Defold!

By King

The Game

Blossom Blast Saga is a lovely flower linking game from the makers of Candy Crush Saga &
Farm Heroes Saga. Link your way through bee-autiful gardens full of colorful buds!
Make the buds bloom to clear the flowerbeds before you run out of moves! Link 3 or more
buds of the same color to grow them. Sit back and watch as you set off an epic chain
reaction of blooming flowers. If the chain begins to shake, you’re in for a big
surprise!

The Process

We’ve made a lot of games together. We got a couple of hundred games at Royal Games
[https://www.royalgames.com/]. When we wanted to try the same thing on the mobile we
needed a good game engine for mobile games. We needed to be able to iterate fast, to try
things out. That’s why we chose Defold as our main engine. One day one of the game
designers at the studio came to me with an idea for a game.

We talked it through in a room with a whiteboard where we could sketch out ideas. Two
days later I came back with a working prototype. We had the game in two days. Then of
course it takes a lot more to have a complete finished game. But we had gotten as far as
we needed to say go or no go to continued development. Using Defold is great to
prototype games. It’s easy to just rip things away and add other things and experiment.
When we got further along in the development process we tried the game out in different
smaller markets and the numbers looked really good. People came back to play next day.
That’s the best way we can measure if they thought it was fun or not. Then one day we
got the word that this was gonna be a Saga game. And the Saga games are the big flagship
games here at King so that put different expectations on us. But we still wanted to see
if it was possible to make a Saga game in a different way. We wanted to do that Genesis
studio flavor. So, What we saw when we started using Defold is that it is really fast.

“What we saw when we started using Defold is that it is really fast.”

It starts in just a couple of seconds. Lua lets us write really short and simple code.
We felt that using Lua and being able to just remove one line of code or ad another in
the prototyping phase to iterate on the game was superior for us. Another thing that’s
been really good for us with Defold is the ability to empower the artist. For too long
time we’ve been having designers doing their stuff in Photoshop and sending the PNG’s to
us. Now they can take control of their stuff directly in the Defold editor and they can
try stuff out and be creative.

The Team

At the Genesis Studio we create new games. We are the new IP studio. We try things and
throw them away. Try another thing and throw it away. Until we find what works. To do
this we need to be fast and small. So the studio consists of super small teams of only
one developer, one designer, and one game designer.
I was the lone developer during the prototype phase, then for a long time we were only
two developers on the game, then we ramped up to four developers just before the launch.
When it comes to game development we really see the benefit of having really small
teams. With only three, four, five person teams you can be really creative. You sit
there working and you have the other team members just right next to you so you can talk
and experiment and help each other out.